You are a Priest! A sermon for Nov. 25, 2012

A Sermon for November 25, 2012 (Proper 29, RCL B)

Offered by Nathan Ferrell for The Church of Saint Mary

Texts:             Daniel 7:9-10,13-14; Psalm 93; Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37

Primary Message:  we are priests in service to Truth
Call to Action:          embrace your priesthood, commit yourself to Truth
Title:               You are a Priest

My sisters and brothers: we are priests together called to passionately and diligently seek after Truth.

Some of you know that I was once a Baptist minister! At least the Discernment Committee knows this little secret! But it’s not actually a secret. Four years before being ordained in the Episcopal Church, I was first ordained as a Baptist minister of the Gospel in Richmond, Virginia.

In May of 1998, when I graduated from the Baptist Theological Seminary in Richmond, I was ordained by a congregation with historic ties to the Southern Baptist Convention.

Now, I understand that those historic ties carry a lot of negative baggage these days. Rest assured that I never felt at home among the fundamentalists in the Southern Baptist world, and I hope that the brevity of my time within the Baptist fold itself testifies to my personal uneasiness within the Baptist tradition.

But I always have appreciated one of the hallmarks of Baptist life from the very beginning of that movement. And that hallmark is their emphasis upon the priesthood of all believers.

There can be no question at all that the movement started by Jesus of Nazareth in the region of Galilee was radically egalitarian when compared to the societies in which the first churches lived.

Throughout the entire New Testament, there are repeated assertions of the role that all disciples play in Christ’s kingdom. We see it here today in our reading from the Revelation to John:

“To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever” (Revelation 1:5b-6).  

Christ has made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God. When the medieval Roman church placed an over-emphasis upon the hierarchy of church leadership, the Baptists were among those who responded by returning to the original, egalitarian teachings of the New Testament. And they were right.

We are all priests, my friends! Each one of us was ordained a priest when we were baptized into Christ. Each one of us is called to share in this kingdom of priests.    

Do you remember the sentence of welcome that we all say together at the conclusion of each baptism? It’s right on Page 308 in the Prayer Book.

Please pick up the Prayer Book and take a look. After the prayer for the seven-fold gifts of the Holy Spirit at the top of the page, we move to the sentence of welcome at the bottom. It’s a masterful statement, worthy of our meditation.

Let’s read it together aloud right now: “We receive you into the household of God. Confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in his eternal priesthood.”

Share with us in his eternal priesthood.

My friends, this is who we are! Partakers in Christ’s priesthood, members of his body.

I believe that it is absolutely vital for us all to grasp this truth about ourselves. So I want you to please repeat after me and to declare this with conviction, “I am a priest!”

Good! Now, let’s do one more thing to drive this point home. Turn to your neighbor sitting next to you and look them in the eye and say, “You are a priest!”

Excellent! A number of you have remarked to me about the changes in the list of names on the front of the Sunday bulletins. I think that it is helpful to add some clarity to that list, especially for those new to Saint Mary’s. But in preparing for today, I realized that I had left out the most obvious recognition of all. And that is you!

You are the ministers of the Church, and together we share in the priesthood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I know that this gets confusing because of the language that we commonly use.     I am considered to be a priest among you, but actually I have been ordained to serve as a presbyter.

Presbyter is a Greek word meaning “elder”. That is my role among you, to serve as a wise elder. Now, I may not look like an elder to many of you, but at least I think that I fit the part a bit better than the 19 year Mormon “elders” sent out on missions around the world!

An elder in a family, a leader among a group of ministers, all working together to carry on the priestly work of Jesus Christ in this world. That is who we are.

But what does it mean to carry on the eternal priesthood of Christ in the world? What does that look like? I believe that one way to understand this is through a relentless commitment to the truth.

Our Gospel reading appointed for today concludes by leaving out the final sentence of the paragraph, which happens to be, in my opinion, one of the key verses in the entire Gospel of John.

Jesus responds to Pilate’s questioning with an assertion that might seem obscure but in fact is poignant and profound – too profound for Pilate, surely. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Pilate’s reply is the final piece of this conversation which, very unfortunately, is left out of our reading today. For Pilate responds by asking Jesus, “What is truth?” (John 18:38).

You see, Pilate cares nothing about truth; he cares only about power, strength, political force. He asks Jesus if he is a King. This is the only language that he knows. This is how Pilate sees the world: authority, power, rank, force.

But Jesus speaks a different language and it is a priestly language: light, love, life, way, truth. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

My friends: I want to suggest to you that our task as priests in God’s kingdom is to passionately and diligently seek after truth. But this is not an easy task, and truth is often lost in the world of competing ideas.

 

When I spent a college semester abroad in the southern African nation of Botswana, a young, urban, professional single mother hosted me for about 6 weeks. Her name was Barbara Badimela, and she lived in the capital city of Gabarone with her two sons. One Sunday morning, I invited Barbara to join me at an international Baptist church in the city where the services were in English and the congregation comprised people from many different nations. (This was during my stint as a Baptist while in college, after all.) The service was similar to that which you might experience at any standard protestant gathering here in the States. Afterward, I asked Barbara what she thought and I was very surprised by her answer. “I could never go to a church like that. Did you see those women wearing pants?! Ah!”

Although Barbara was quite westernized – she spent hours watching western soap operas every day, yet she still held deep-seated African cultural norms which explicitly forbade women from wearing pants. This was a red-line for her.

I was amazed, and this forced me to begin to consider for the first time in my life the power of our culture, and how easily we tend to embrace the norms of our culture without question.

How to separate truth from culture is an enormous issue, and one which we can barely touch on here. But let me suggest to you that to be priests in the kingdom of Christ means that we are always asking the questions, always seeking truth beyond the accepted notions of our culture. It means that we are never content with easy answers, and that we never confuse the exercise of power with the pursuit of truth.

To be priests together in Christ’s kingdom, passionately and diligently seeking after truth, means that we live every day in service to the God who is, the God who was, and the God who is still to come. Amen.

A sermon for November 18, 2012 - Open Hands and Open Heart

A Sermon for November 18, 2012 (Proper 28, RCL B)

Offered by Nathan Ferrell for The Church of Saint Mary

Texts:             Daniel 12:1-3; Psalm 16; Hebrews 10:11-14,19-25; Mark 13:1-8

Primary Message:              God always pushes us into new paradigms

Call to Action:          Be ready for the future; live with open hands.

Title:                        Open Hands and Open Heart   

O Lord, make us masters of ourselves so that we might become the servants of others. Take our minds and think through them. Take our mouths and speak through them. Take our hearts and set them on fire. Amen.

My dear sisters and brothers: God calls us to live with open hands and open hearts.

For many of us, this is not an easy thing to do. We become attached to those things in our lives which make us feel safe and secure and comfortable.

And we tend to cling closely to them. Now, this kind of attachment or clinging is a way of being, an interior mindset. But there is a physical action which closely corresponds to this. It is the clenched fist.

We all know it and we can feel it. Here; let me show you. All of you – right now, raise your hands and hold up two tightly clenched fists. Got it? Pay attention. Do you feel that?

Good. Now, open your hands and drop them down in front of you – like this – and hold out in front of you your two hands – open. OK? Now, can you feel the difference? Good. Hold on to that feeling for the next few minutes as we turn back again to our Gospel reading this morning.

As they left the Temple, Jesus said: “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another. All will be thrown down.”

My friends: try for a moment to place yourself back within the worldview of the disciples. Do you realize how shocking this statement from Jesus must have been to them?

To ask these faithful Jews to imagine the utter destruction of the Temple was asking them to imagine an entirely different world.

Let’s make sure that we understand this; that we’re clear about this.

For the disciples to imagine the destruction of the Temple is perhaps tantamount to you and I imagining the Capitol building in Washington, DC being obliterated, and the Washington monument being knocked over, and the Statue of Liberty being pulled down and tossed into the New York Harbor.

No, maybe even more. It is like imagining that a foreign power has done all of this and has taken over our nation and now we are no longer allowed to sing our national anthem or fly the American flag.

Can you imagine what it would feel like if those actions were now prohibited and liable to be punished swiftly and violently?

This is EXACTLY what Jesus is asking of these disciples!

To imagine an entirely different world, where this Temple – which had been the rich symbol and the central organizing principle of their nation and their culture for over 500 years – to imagine a world in which this Temple was destroyed by their enemies.

A world in which everything that they felt they could cling to, everything which they believed would last and would stand as inviolable and sacred  - where all of that would be taken away.

What the Lord asks is for them to change their entire consciousness, their complete manner of seeing and understanding the world.

Today we speak of this as a paradigm shift. This is an extreme case of it, to be certain, and it is frightening to consider, isn’t it?

Most of us are afraid when facing major changes, when those people or things upon which we had relied and counted on are no longer there.  

As soon as I begin to think of those things and consider the threat of them being taken away, then it seems that I instinctively become defensive. Such thoughts automatically place us in a defensive position.  We want to shield this thing, to protect it, to guard it.

We start to close our hands. We enter into a closed-fist position.

But God provides us with another way – a better way.

The power of Christ working deep within our hearts allows us to live our lives every day with open hands, and an open heart.

Not with closed fists, resisting any possible change to those things which we love and cling to. But rather open, sustained by confidence in the goodness of God.

To imagine the world in an entirely different way is vital for us to engage more deeply with God’s mission in the world, because God is the one who is always calling us forth into the future.

I recently heard the story of Katie Davis.

As an 18 year old from Tennessee, Katie was able to travel to Uganda during Christmas break in 2006 with her church youth group. What she saw there changed her life forever. Katie was immediately captivated by the people and the culture of Uganda. Her heart was touched by the graciousness of the Ugandan people, but also by their immensity of their needs. In Uganda, Katie was able to see the world in an entirely different way. And everything changed.

13 months later, in January of 2008, Katie had graduated from high school and she decided to leave everything behind.

Katie returned to Uganda to launch a new effort at helping impoverished children there to receive a basic elementary school education and the basic food staples needed to live, and to be nurtured by a loving, caring, Christian community. Today, Katie is a 24 year old young woman living in Uganda, still leading her non-profit. But what is more amazing is that Katie is now in fact a mother – at 24 years of age! – a mother of 13, because she has officially adopted 13 orphaned Ugandan girls. (See more of her story here: http://www.amazima.org/katiesstory.html).

By traveling to a different culture, by living among the people, and by her willingness to leave behind all that she has known, Katie Davis experienced a paradigm shift. With open hands and an open heart, she is now able to work with God to change the lives of people in amazing ways.

We here at Saint Mary’s continue to find ourselves in a time of change and transition. Of course, nothing like that which faced the disciples in the eventual destruction of Jerusalem, and the dismantling of the entire nation of Judah.

Nothing at all quite like that, but you have faced many changes which are unsettling nonetheless.

And there is more to come. We are beginning to make plans now for a change to our Sunday morning schedule.  We are planning to change the start of our second service from 10 AM to 10:30.

We will do this in order to make way for something new: an hour of Christian Formation for all ages beginning every Sunday morning at 9:30. 

   

You may be surprised to know that this change was not even my suggestion, but we have discussed now it among the staff and among the Vestry and I support it.  

Why, you ask? Why change our Sunday schedule in order to make room for this Formation hour?

Basically, we need time together as a community in order to study and learn and discuss together. Gathering at 9:30 will allow our people from both services to meet together in groups to study the Bible, to practice different ways of prayer, to talk together about how we live as followers of Christ.

When the Legacy project is completed in early 2013, all ages will gather to do this from 9:30 to 10:30 each Sunday morning: our Guiding Ray classes will begin at 9:30, our teens will meet together in their new space below the Chapel, and different groups will be available for all adults to join. Then, at 10:30, everyone will be invited to gather for worship here in this sacred space. 

Thanks to all of you who have made the commitment to support the Legacy campaign, we will soon be blessed with wonderful new spaces where all of these different groups can meet together at the same time. It makes sense then for us to use these beautiful new spaces to their utmost potential.

Of course, there are a number of different issues to consider before making this change, and we need to take our time to consider all of these carefully before a change like this is implemented. Therefore,  we will wait until some point in the new year before this change is made.

My friends, we all know that change is difficult, but if we are wise then we will expect it and with God’s help we can be ready for it. Even more than this: by walking through this changing life with Christ, we can embrace the future even when it is unknown and uncertain.

God is calling us to imagine a new future, my friends.

Be ready for it – not with closed fists in order to guard yourself from the change that is coming.

But welcome the future with open hands, with open hearts, with confidence and trust that God is working all things together for good for those who love God and who are called as part of God’s purpose.

Amen. 

A sermon for November 11, 2012 - Unless the Lord builds the house

Better late than never! Life has been a bit hectic and crazy lately, but here is the first message delivered at Saint Mary's in Falmouth, Maine. 

A Sermon for Proper 27 (RCL B) 11-11-2012

Offered by Nathan Ferrell for The Church of Saint Mary

Texts:             Hebrews 9:24-28; Psalm 127; Mark 12:38-44

Primary message:  The local church is the hope of the world      

Call to action:          Commit everything to join God’s work in the church

Title:               Unless the Lord builds the house

My dear brothers and sisters: God is building something new here in this community known as Saint Mary’s.

And what a privilege it is for me and Erin and our children, Angus and Se’ and Fiona, to be part of the new work that God is doing in this place. It is a great joy and a privilege!

After all, you and I have been called to labor together with God to build the house of God, which is nothing else but the community of those who have found new life in Christ.

You must understand this: I am absolutely convinced that the local church is the hope of the world.

I am convinced that groups of ordinary, average people just like you and me who gather together to be filled with the grace of God so that we might pour out that grace to others – that groups just like this right here are the hope of the world.

Let’s be clear about this: politicians can’t save the world. Businesses can’t do it. The university will not save the world.

All of these persons and groups have their role to play, but in the final analysis it is only the church that can transform the world!

It is only the Body of Christ that can make this world to be what God intended it to be!

How is this possible? Of course, it is not about us, after all. This is God’s doing; it is God’s work being done by God’s people with God’s energy.

God works through the church!

As crazy as it sounds, my friends, God has no other plan for humanity except for the Church!

And this Church through whom God works is an assembly of ordinary people like you and me who open our hearts to the living God and become channels of God’s grace to others.

I can remember very clearly the time that I first began to realize this for myself.

I was raised in a small country parish in the village of Vincentown, New Jersey. This was Trinity Episcopal Church, and it was founded in the 1800’s as a chapel for summer visitors escaping the heat of Philadelphia.

We were not very regular attenders. Our family was mostly of the “Christmas-and-Easter” variety (do you know any folks like this?). So I remember going to the Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve at this little parish when I was a senior in High School. By that time, I had become quite an idealist. I was truly disappointed with the world as it was, and I wanted to change it. I wanted to see people respect one another, and love one another. I wanted to experience some real peace in the world.

And at the passing of the peace there on Christmas Eve, in the candlelight, when all of these folks who had known me for my entire life were hugging me and hugging each other, at THAT moment it first began to dawn on me: HERE IT IS!

Here is the peace and love and joy and hope that I was seeking! Right here, in this ordinary, simple little country chapel, among these very people gathered together because of the love of God poured out on the world in Jesus Christ.

Well, what about us here at Saint Mary’s? How are we going to do this? How will we manifest this transforming grace of God in the months and years to come?

The details, of course, remain to be seen.

But I can tell you this much with certainty.

There are three things that we are going to do together.

Three paths of action which will be characteristic hallmarks of this Saint Mary’s community.

We are going to celebrate God and the gifts of life.

We are going to honor one another.

We are going to serve the needs of the world.

Got it? Can you remember these?

(Well, they’re written down in your bulletin, if you need some help!)

Celebrate.                  Honor.               Serve.

Let’s say them together. Are you ready? “Celebrate! Honor! Serve!”

Excellent!

Celebrate God and the goodness of life. Honor one another. Serve the needs of others.

It’s that simple. I am convinced that this is the kind of community which God is calling us to be, the kind of house that the Lord wishes building in this place.

A house where God is celebrated, where all that God has done for us is celebrated.

After all, this is why we gather together every Sunday – to celebrate our new life in Christ!

We will celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, promotions and graduations, retirements and new homes, weddings and baptisms, Earth Days and pet blessings, and even funerals.

I suspect that some of you might even get a bit tired of all the celebrating that we are going to do together! I can imagine someone saying, “Gee, can’t we just get together for a good complaining session?! to lament and to complain about all of the problems in the world. I mean, why do we have to celebrate all of the time?”

Nope, sorry! Can’t do it! After all, God has called us to “rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and give thanks in all circumstances.” That sounds like a whole lot of celebration to me!

We will also be a house in which all people are honored.

We will honor the gifts of our children and youth. We will honor the faithfulness and wisdom of our seniors. We will honor those who give and serve in whatever capacity, big or small. Jesus honored the poor widow who put in only two small coins. But that was a great sacrifice for her, and Jesus knew this and he honored her. We will honor those who have gone before us, those who have made this place, and this parish community, possible. We will honor the strangers in our midst – guests and visitors and seekers. And we will honor those among us with whom we disagree, for we are all called to be the family of God together.

And we will be a house which serves the needs of the world in the power of the Holy Spirit.

I know that you are already very good at this. We will build on the good outreach work already in place and reach out more and more to those in need here in our towns, across the nation, and around the world.

This is the kind of house that God is building among us.

And again, let me say it: there is nothing else in the world like the local church!

When working together as we are called to do, there is no other group or organization anywhere on earth which has the potential to be and to do so much good!

I am convinced of this. I will stake my life on this fact. And I invite you to join me in this journey.

In your bulletins, I have shared with you a special prayer of dedication. It is called “My Morning Prayer.”

Take it out now please. We will pray it together as an act of commitment to this new journey that we are beginning together.

“God, this is a new day. I freshly commit myself to the role you have invited me to play, as you are building your church in this world. I am awestruck again today that you include me in this grand life-giving, world-transforming endeavor. So today I joyfully offer you: my love, my heart, my talents, my energy, my creativity, my faithfulness, my resources, and my gratitude. I commit all of myself to the role you have assigned me in the building of your church so that it may thrive in this world. And I will ‘bring it’ today. I will bring my best. You deserve it. Your church deserves it. It is the hope of the world.” 

Sign it and date it, if you are ready to do so. This is for you to keep, to remember and to pray again and again.

Just remember, my friends, how incredible, how awesome this is! We have been invited to labor with God in the transformation of the world. What a gift! What a privilege!

And what a joy to be able to labor together with God in this very special and wonderful community known as Saint Mary’s. Amen.